


In the Gloaming

by Missy



Category: Robin Hood (Traditional), Robin Hood - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Revenge, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Violence, Revenge, Taxes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 14:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything changed the night Robin died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Gloaming

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Ladies' Bingo, Prompt: Taxes

Everything changed the night Robin died.

Marian quivered at the memory of it; the sight of the knife wound suppurating blood from his chest, spitting pain and agony along with his life down his ribs, across her hands. There was little for Friar Tuck to do but make him comfortable, marry he and Marian by proxy, and leave them to be until the cold moon stole him from her arms.

The next morning, she demanded Little John train her.

“Tis no place for a noble or a lady,” he declared, but she still wore her haphazard bridal veil and the leaf-strewn dirt from Robin’s grave at the hem of her dress. He couldn’t have turned her away had she come to him with withered limbs and enfeebled appetite. 

Marian had the constitution of a pirate king, in the end. She took to bowing and swordsmanship in a way that left most of their troops envious, and she learned to leap from limb to limb without crushing her spine through grit, forcing herself to hide her blistered palms and skinned knees from the ladies in waiting and nursemaids at the homecastle.

The bitter taste of revenge consumed her very soul; it nibbled her moral fiber and boiled her sense of humor alive. That bitter heart of hers led her to new methods of torture and evidence gathering; it was she who turned John’s old hot iron trick and applied it to the screaming faces of his captured soldiers; and then she figured out how to hurl St. Elmo’s fire across great distances. Let it all burn, she told them, down to the wooden jousts; let the peasants join us, let us drum up an army to drown Fat John’s fools alive.

When she could launch herself through the branches with no pain, when she could ride like a hoyden through the woods, when she could out-joust, out-draw and out-battle every man on the team, John stepped back; he proclaimed Marian ready and dedicated him to her orders. Marian simply fashioned a dark green cloak like his and wore it to her first raid.

The raids on John’s lands began in earnest then; soon she had accumulated a fortress of a hundred and forty men, then one thousand, all of them hungry and willing to join up, all of them starved near to death by John’s taxations. They supported her as a supplicant would Christ, as a vassle would his lord.

They could not fail. It was near to a foregone conclusion to Marion that they would not.

*** 

Crouched upon the elms, she watched John’s castle burn to the ground. The money was distributed among the families he had stolen excessive alms from, and his neck fell upon Marian’s blade.

Then John returned, as if summoned by God – later , much later, he would take her into his confidence and confess that Robin had summoned him. Taxation was just once again- most of those around Marian were content to let the matter lie.

But around her Marian saw endless examples of suffering; of women under the heels of men, men under the heels of their lords, and all under the heels of poverty and illness. She sees now that her beloved cousin has been robbing Peter to pay the Pauls, and that he must rob Paul to pay them all back.

The cycle forms and expands before she knows it, but she has little control over it, for the fox is forever doomed to chase the hound.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **Robin Hood** , all of whom are the property of the **Public Domain**


End file.
